


At the Crossroads

by voodoochild



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Blues, Drug Addiction, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-05
Updated: 2011-07-05
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:30:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock's been down to the crossroads many times. The blues help pull him back out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the Crossroads

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a **sherlockbbc_fic** prompt. Inspired by my own love of the blues and Eric Clapton's revamp of the Robert Johnson song "Crossroad Blues".

It's all or nothing when it comes to the blues, Sherlock has found.

You can't just listen to the blues, you have to love them or hate them. The genre contains so much pain and sorrow that it either speaks to a person or it doesn't. If you don't love it, you never will, and if you do love it, nothing else matches it - except possibly, in rare moments and moods, Mozart.

Mycroft's never understood; neither has Mummy. Father had, a little, when Sherlock was young and just discovering the blues. Father had found him with a Walkman and a Robert Johnson tape and had nodded in understanding, telling him "next time you go to the record shop, try some B.B. King".

Father had been right, B.B. King was good. He was real Delta blues, slow wail of a bottleneck guitar, and Sherlock had gone on to devour other records - Son House, Elmore James, Leadbelly, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters. It hadn't been until his teenage years and a driver who worked nights as a bouncer at Ain't Nothing But in Soho that he'd gotten a taste of Chicago and electric blues.

John Lee Hooker and "Boom Boom" taught him that blues could be dirty in one way. Howlin' Wolf and "Smokestack Lightning" taught him that blues could be dirty in another. And for a boy coming of age in Mayfair, surrounded by public school upbringing and well-to-do neighbors, songs about sex and adultery and women and men just blew his mind.

He'd devoured record after record, tape after tape, discovering more and more artists: Butterfield played a brilliant harmonica. Diddley's skill on the guitar was unmatched. Billie and Koko and Janis howled the blues better than the men. Willie's lyrics made him stop and think. Beck and Page and Vaughan took the blues and electrified them.

But it all came back, in a way, to "Crossroads", because when he was sixteen, Sherlock saw Eric Clapton for the first time.

Not the "darling, you look wonderful tonight" crooner, but the man who brought the blues to Britain. The man who inspired Hendrix to write "Stone Free". The man whose name is still scrawled across the Islington tube station, which he'd had to go see for himself. The man who brought the woman tone to blues music, and revamped Johnson for a new generation.

"Sweet Home Chicago" surprised him; of course he knew it from Johnson's original and the Blues Brothers cover (fantastic movie, Mycroft could never understand why he quoted it incessantly), but hearing Clapton sing it was just better. "Me and the Devil Blues" was just as haunting and chilling as it should be, but with a much darker tone than even Johnson had given it.

Whenever Clapton played a show in London, Sherlock just had to go. He saw the Cream reunion at the Royal Albert Hall - four months' worth of favors for Mycroft for the tickets - and so beyond worth it. He saw the Summer Tour in '08, strung-out on speedballs of coke and heroin, and listened to Hard Rock Calling while squatting in a tiny Hyde Park flat a block away.

He missed Clapton's tour with Beck in late '09 due to the detox, six months of enforced rehab, going cold-turkey from all the drugs he'd shot, swallowed, and snorted. Dull, so dull, and the only things that made each day worth getting up for was listening to the two CD's he was allowed to bring: _Riding with the King_ and _The Cream of Clapton_. Played them both on an endless loop, reserving "White Room" and "Cocaine" and "After Midnight" for the worst of days and "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Layla" and "When My Heart Beats Like a Hammer" for the good days.

Even Clapton had to go to rehab.

His reward for kicking the drugs was twofold; access to a high-profile triple-homicide that had gone unsolved for months, and an invite to the release party for Clapton's new album. He'd been pleasantly surprised that Greg Lestrade intended upon being involved with both, but it turned out that the Inspector not only was the least incompetent copper at Scotland Yard, but a Clapton fan and a half-decent guitar player himself.

And so they grow from reluctant-on-Greg's-part colleagues into reluctant-on-Sherlock's-part friends. They quote blues songs at crime scenes, to the confusion of Sally and Anderson. They try to hit Ain't Nothing But or the Blues Kitchen every other weekend, or a live show somewhere. Greg remains one of three people to ever hear Sherlock attempt to sing - he admits, he lacks a sense of his own pitch - and transpose "Crossroads" for violin. And Sherlock has blackmail material for years because the footage of Greg covering "Honky Tonk Women" (Taj Mahal, of course, not the Stones, though Greg likes both) is on both his phone and his laptop.

Sherlock is doubtful when John Watson shows up, but two weeks after "A Study in Pink", as he's dubbed it, he catches John debating the merits of Blues Brothers 2000 as a purely musical movie with Greg and humming "How Blue Can You Get?" when he gets out of the shower the next morning.

He decides John can stay, though the Gwen Stefani album is going to have to go.


End file.
